Taking Quantum Entanglement To A New Level: Breakthrough From Austria and Germany

April 14, 2018

4 minute read

If we want quantum computers, we’re going to need a complex system of entangled qubits – quantum bits that are intrinsically linked so that whatever happens to one instantaneously affects another.

Indeed, being able to pass information between entangled photons quickly and efficiently is the key to developing faster quantum computers; the more entangled particles being added to the mix, the more information can be processed.

The difficulty today is that qubits are inherently fragile and difficult to read. Furthermore, interlinking more of them together in their ‘entangled’ quantum state makes the overall system more unstable. This is a significant technical challenges for those working in the field.

However, according to recent reports from Austria and Germany, a team of scientists have smashed the entanglement record by creating a 20-bit quantum register. This could be a breakthrough in the field of quantum computing.

Understanding Quantum Computing

Qubits are the building blocks of quantum computing, just like bits are the building blocks of traditional computing. However, what makes them radical is that they rely on subatomic particles’ spooky ability to exist in more than one state at the same time.

Regular bits in classical computers exist in a binary state of either 1 or 0. Qubits, on the other hand, can exist in a superposition of both 1-0 at the same time.

Moreover, if the qubits can be combined to create a register of well-characterised, ‘entangled’ qubits, they could be used to tackle the hardest computing problems at staggering speeds.

Quantum Entanglement Breakthrough

Image describing quantum entanglement

The team, led by Ben Lanyon and Rainer Blatt at the Institute of Quantum Optics and Quantum Information (IQOQI) at the Austrian Academy of Sciences, enlisted the help of theoretical physicists from the University of Ulm and the Institute of Quantum Optics.

The previous record for a quantum register with individually addressable qubits was set in 2011, when physicists from Rainer Blatt‘s laboratory at the Institute of Experimental Physics at the University of Innsbruck in Austria entangled 14 individually addressable qubits for the first time.

Now, Blatt and his team have built a system of 20 qubits whose quantum states can be individually controlled.

In this experiment, 20 charged calcium atoms, or ions, arranged in a line served as the qubits, and they were entangled using a series of lasers. The team were able to get the calcium ions to entangle with two, three, or occasionally even four other calcium ions in the system.

Why Is This Different?

This isn’t the first time so many particles have been entangled – but what’s exciting is that the team were able to individually read and address each of the qubits.

“There are quantum systems such as ultra-cold gases in which entanglement between a large number of particles has been detected,” said lead author Nicolai Friis, a physicist at the Austrian Academy of Sciences in Vienna.

But in these cases, the individual quantum states of the qubits aren’t controllable, and nor can the system read out the individual qubits.

IonTrap

To overcome this, the team used an ion trap to confine the calcium ions using a magnetic field. Then they used lasers to entangle the ions, creating a 20-qubit system, with each qubit encoded into the electronic state of a trapped atomic ion.

However, an entangled system involving multiple particles can’t be described as individual particles, but only as a whole entangled multi-particle system. This makes detection difficult – so the team had to devise a custom means of detecting multi-particle entanglement.

“The particles are first entangled in pairs,” explained senior author Ben Lanyon from the Austrian Academy of Sciences. His team worked alongside researchers at the University of Ulm in Germany.

“With the methods developed by our colleagues Vienna and Ulm, we can then prove the further spread of the entanglement to all neighbouring particle triplets, most quadruplets and a few quintuplets.”

Goals and Implications

The theorists at Ulm and Vienna developed two different approaches. The Vienna team developed a method that uses only a small number of measurements with results that are easy to evaluate. This method was used to detect the entanglement of up to three particles at one time in the register.

The Ulm team took a more complex, but efficient, numerical approach. It was able to detect the entanglement of up to five particles at a time. Using these methods, they were able to show all 20 qubits being entangled.

But the team believes the methods they devised can be used to create an even larger quantum register – and, because the qubits can be read individually, it would be suitable for applications such as quantum simulations and quantum information processing.

“Our medium-term goal is 50 particles,” Blatt said. “This could help us solve problems that the best supercomputers today still fail to accomplish.”

Welcome to Quantumbusiness.org. The first news portal dedicated to exploring the quantum computing revolution and its forthcoming impact on global industry.For more information on content creation and the opportunity to share your story with the world, please contact our lead editor Hal Briggs [hal@quantumbusiness.org].